Rico Slade will indeed kill you. The man, he’s on a mission to stop Baron Mayhem from destroying the planet with a bomb that can eliminate everything but the world’s currency. However, if you step in his way, he has no qualms about tearing your throat out with his bare hands; whether you’re a middle-aged tourist walking the streets of Hollywood, or you’re a grandmother on an airplane. But the story is deeper than that. Rico Slade is just a character in an action movie series. Chip Johnson is the balding actor that plays Slade, with an ever-growing stomach, terrible fashion sense, and an inability to decipher between reality and his character’s world.
Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You is a Bizarro peek inside the absurd world of celebrity where criminal punishment is mere suggestion and any and all press is fantastic press. If you aren’t familiar with Bizarro, as this was my first foray into the genre, then make sure you crack the first page with an open mind. It blends satire with the grotesque, a literary Garbage Pail Kids on meth, if you will. You’ll read about human juices and euphemisms for body parts Urban Dictionary may not have entries for yet. However, just because high schools around the nation won’t be jumping at covering these books in their classrooms anytime soon, not that you should be using public schools as a measuring stick for what you read, it doesn’t mean Bizarro is any less relevant or important.
The point here is to have a statement and cause you to feel at the same time. Although the excessive violence and action in the book toes the line of overkill, and then urinates all over that line, it really isn’t a far cry from what we see time again in our theaters. And while the anti-hero walks in self-perpetuated slow motion from an explosion while lighting his cigar, you realize this isn’t the movie. This is the actor, in the real world, creating mayhem and getting away with it. He lives and breathes the same air as the starlets in and out of rehab, burning through fifth, sixth, and seventh chances at being tolerable humans in the free world.
The writing here is easy enough to follow and serves as a nice reprieve from heavier reads. There’s a chapter that consists of the title and one single word, “Shit.” Where else can you find that brand of comedic genius, to devote an entire chapter to one word, and to have that word be a simple exclamation of profanity? It sure beats the long-winded ravings of a Franzen or Dickens. If you want a quick read riddled with perversion and audacious fun, check out Bradley Sands‘ Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You. It’s a good time, a real good goddamn time.
Release Date: February 4, 2011
Order: HERE
Official Website: HERE
Sean P Ferguson.com 